Editing Japan (section)

=== Critical Buddhism ===

Although chronologically and institutionally distinct from the prewar radicals discussed above, "Critical Buddhism" (批判仏教 ''hihan Bukkyō'') represents the most theoretically ambitious postwar development of the same underlying project, an attempt to hold Buddhist doctrine accountable to standards of social justice, and is treated by the Radical Buddhism Project as a direct intellectual heir to this earlier tradition. The movement was launched in the late 1980s by two Sōtō Zen-affiliated scholars, Hakamaya Noriaki (袴谷憲昭) and Matsumoto Shirō (松本史朗), whose work was galvanized in part by a 1979 incident in which Machida Muneo (町田宗夫), then secretary-general of the Sōtō sect, publicly denied that any social discrimination existed in Japan, in direct response to a draft World Conference on Religion and Peace statement of concern for the ''burakumin''.<ref>Shields (2011). ''Critical Buddhism: Engaging with Modern Japanese Buddhist Thought''. Ashgate, p. 1.</ref> Hakamaya and Matsumoto argued that authentic Buddhism was, at its core, ''critica'', a commitment to rational, discriminating analysis rooted in the doctrine of dependent origination (''pratītya-samutpāda''), and that this criticalism had been progressively displaced across the history of East Asian Buddhism, and above all within Zen, by ''topica'', an aesthetic monism of harmony, holism, and "original enlightenment" (本覚 ''hongaku'') thought that the Critical Buddhists trace to the controversial doctrine of the womb or matrix of Buddhahood (''tathāgatagarbha'').<ref>Shields (2023), "A Century of Critical Buddhism", pp. 283–285.</ref> On this basis, they mounted a sweeping and highly polemical attack on prominent modern Japanese thinkers, including D. T. Suzuki, Nishida Kitarō, and Nishitani Keiji (西谷啓治) of the Kyoto School, and even on their own Sōtō sect, arguing that Zen's ethical failures during the wartime period were less an aberration than the natural culmination of ''topica''s neglect of critical, discriminating ethics.<ref>Shields (2023), "A Century of Critical Buddhism", pp. 282–283.</ref> Scholars including Paul Swanson have distinguished three levels at which the Critical Buddhist analysis of Zen operates: a Buddhological critique of the historical misuse of doctrines such as Buddha-nature; a sectarian critique of Sōtō Zen's own departure from the teachings of its founder, Dōgen (道元, 1200–1253); and a social critique linking both to Buddhist institutional apathy or collaboration under Japanese wartime nationalism.<ref>Shields (2023), "A Century of Critical Buddhism", p. 283.</ref>

Although Critical Buddhism has no direct organizational lineage to the prewar Buddhist socialists and anarchists discussed above, Shields argues that it belongs to a recognizable genealogy of "critical" Japanese Buddhism stretching back through the New Buddhist Fellowship and, especially, Seno'o Girō's Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism, both of which anticipated the Critical Buddhists' rejection of "topicalist" harmony and quietism, if from an explicitly socialist rather than a primarily doctrinal or philosophical standpoint.<ref>Shields (2023), "A Century of Critical Buddhism", pp. 286, 297–298.</ref> Critics have nonetheless noted the limitations of Critical Buddhism as a vehicle for radical social critique in its own right: unlike Seno'o or the New Buddhists, Hakamaya and Matsumoto offer little sustained analysis of political economy, and Shields has proposed supplementing their "criticalism" with the historical-materialist ideology critique of Karl Mannheim and Karl Marx, and with the Nichiren-derived utopian tradition running from Tarui Tōkichi through Seno'o Girō, in order to give Critical Buddhism's largely individualistic, liberal-humanist framework a more thoroughly structural or "materialist" account of Buddhist social praxis.<ref>Shields, James Mark (2014). "From Topos to Utopia: Critical Buddhism, Globalization, and Ideology Criticism". In: Kalmanson, Leah, & Shields, James Mark (Eds.), ''Buddhist Responses to Globalization'': 51–77. Lexington Books, pp. 63–72.</ref>